Some relocations were accomplished without wars. Pawnees and Poncas from Nebraska, Comanches from Wyoming, Tonkawas from Texas: all were moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Some military campaigns against Indians had no goal other than cultural suppression. In 1890, soldiers harried the adherents of what whites called the “Ghost Dance”—a ritual originated by the Paiute visionary Wovoka to commemorate the dead. In December 1890, the campaign climaxed in the massacre of a Dakota encampment at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. The U.S. Army reported killing 146 people, though the actual number was closer to 400, mostly women, children, and old men. Congress awarded twenty Medals of Honor to soldiers who had participated in this last Indian battle of the era.
The federal government also seized Indian lands by statute. In 1887, the General Allotment Act (known as the Dawes Act) divided tribal lands into individual holdings, assigning 160 acres to each head of a family and 80 to each single adult. The government then bought unassigned land and opened it to settlers. In 1891–92, 3.9 million acres—parts of the Sauk and Fox, Pottawatomie-Shawnee, and Cheyenne-Arapaho reservations—were taken in Oklahoma alone.
If none paid more dearly than Native Americans for industrial capitalism’s swift growth, many other Americans suffered too. While the rail system expanded commerce, it also destabilized the economy. Railroad companies established many parallel routes in the northeastern industrial heartland and engaged in cutthroat competition, slashing freight rates to beat out rivals. To offset shrinking profit margins, the companies jacked up rates in other regions and cut railroad workers’ wages. And the less the railroads charged for transporting industrial goods, the more manufacturing firms expanded production to capture national markets—and the more sharply they vied with other firms.* Wage cuts helped to finance price wars, and the losers curtailed production and laid off employees.
Regions developed unequally. Monopoly capitalists headquartered in the Northeast dominated development in the South and West. Southern and western farmers, usually served by a single railroad, paid top dollar to transport crops to market. This exacerbated other problems: the exorbitant interest charged by merchants who extended credit to cotton farmers; the sky-high fees wheat farmers paid to store their crops in grain elevators; and the decline in agricultural prices as production increased. (In 1896, the average price for farm products was half what it had been in 1870.) In the Cotton Belt and on the Great Plains, many family farms went bankrupt. Kansas alone saw 11,000 farm mortgage foreclosures between 1889 and 1893. By 1900, more than a third of all U.S. farms were worked by tenants or sharecroppers rather than owners, debt peonage was increasingly common, and farmhands’ wages remained exceedingly low. Agriculture played a central role in the national economy, with cotton the single largest export and grain and grain products not far behind, but most of the people who produced this wealth were locked into poverty.
Monopolists also restricted industrialization in the South and West. Hampered by higher freight charges, the iron and steel industry centered in Birmingham and the cotton textile industry in the Carolina Piedmont were not only smaller than their northern counterparts but also paid significantly lower wages and used more child labor. In 1896, 25 percent of textile workers in North Carolina were under age sixteen, compared to 5 percent in Massachusetts.
San Francisco was the West’s only manufacturing center. Most of the region’s economy was designed to supply eastern factories with raw or semiprocessed materials—agricultural produce, lumber, cattle, wool, coal, and smelted metal ores. Western industries followed the boom-and-bust cycles of eastern manufacturing, further destabilizing a labor market already weakened by only seasonal work in farming, ranching, and logging, and temporary railroad construction jobs. Though labor was in short supply in the West and workers in most occupations averaged higher daily wages than their eastern counterparts, they worked less often, and many of them—mainly but not only single men—migrated from place to place to find jobs.
THE WORKING CLASSES
As industrial capitalism expanded, so did the ranks of wage workers. By 1900, they numbered about 18 million, up from 6.7 million in 1870; together with their families, they added up to at least three-quarters of the U.S. population of 76 million. They came from ever more diverse backgrounds, and their working conditions varied tremendously. Indeed, Americans in the Gilded Age often spoke of the “working classes” instead of a single working class.
Immigration was a key source of working-class growth and diversity. From 1873 through 1897, 10 million immigrants entered the United States, more than during the previous fifty years; and they came from more places than ever before. European immigrants still outnumbered the rest, but more and more arrived from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Poland, and, in smaller numbers, from Portugal, Spain, Greece, Romania, and Turkey. Syrians and other Arabs came from the Middle East. Japanese as well as Chinese arrived from Asia. In addition to English- and French-speaking Canadians, immigrants from the Western Hemisphere included Mexicans, Caribbean islanders, and South Americans. Nearly all immigrants had one thing in common: they depended on wage work for their livelihoods during their first years in the United States, if not longer.
Some were fleeing ethnic persecution in their homelands. Armenians fled brutality at the hands of Ottoman Turkey. Jews from eastern Europe sought relief from Russia’s Czarist regime, which attacked them with pogroms, barred them from owning land, and confined them to shtetls, Jewish towns in restricted zones.
Most immigrants came in search of better economic opportunities. Many planned to go back home once they had saved enough, and quite a few did. Plans often changed, however. In 1882, Mihailo Evanich’s family in the Croatian village of Smisliak selected him to go to America to earn money to send home. He found work in the copper mines in Calumet, Michigan. A year later he brought over his wife to keep house for him and several of his coworkers. By 1891, the couple had decided to stay and set up a saloon, which they ran as a club for Croat and Slovene miners. Evanich was called “Mike Evans” by his foremen and became a citizen under that name. Some immigrants came and went several times. From the 1890s into the 1920s, Elias Garza moved back and forth between Mexico and the United States, working at a variety of jobs—from meatpacking to railroad track maintenance—in Kansas, California, Texas, and Arizona.
Many immigrants moved from wage work to self-employment. Kinji Ushijima, who arrived from Japan in 1887, worked first as a potato picker but then became a labor contractor. By the 1910s, his business cultivated potatoes on 10,000 acres he had purchased or leased. John Starkku came from Finland in 1890, and for five years worked his way westward, taking jobs in mines and lumber camps and saving every penny he could. When he reached Oregon’s Hood River Valley, he bought land and planted orchards.
Many more immigrants never managed to save much. This was especially true for women who had to make it on their own, with substandard female wages. An Irish-born sewing machine operator told investigators from the Colorado Labor Bureau in 1886: “My parents live in Ireland and are entirely dependent on myself and my sisters for support. . . . I am a good seamstress and work hard. I try but I can not make over one dollar per day.” In 1884, Rosa Cassetari came from the Lombardy region of Italy to join her husband who worked in the iron mines in Union, Missouri. When they saved enough, he bought a brothel, but she refused to live there and moved to Chicago, where she supported her children by washing clothes and cleaning houses. She recalled walking everywhere with her children, nearly freezing to death: “I never took the streetcar. We needed those five cents to eat.” She ended up a cleaning woman in the Chicago Commons, one of many “settlement houses” established by genteel reformers who reached out to the urban poor.
Immigrant groups generally clustered in particular occupations. Chinese men were the majority of migrant farm laborers in California in the 1880s and 1890s. Many Irish women entered domestic service. Slavic men worked mainly in coal mines, steel mills, and railroad maintenance
. Italians and Russian Jews of both sexes tended to concentrate in the garment industry. Puerto Ricans and Cubans often worked in cigar factories in New York City and Tampa and Key West, Florida.
A great many new additions to the wage labor force came from within U.S. borders. As railroads penetrated the Southwest, more and more Mexican Americans went to work in railroad construction and maintenance, in mining, in large-scale commercial farming and ranching, as domestics in Anglo households, and as laundresses and seamstresses in mining and railroad camps. Laguna Pueblos built and maintained the section of the Santa Fe Railroad on their reservation in New Mexico. Mi’kmaq families from northern New England harvested potatoes in Maine and wheat in Wyoming, Montana, and Canadian Alberta and Saskatchewan. Ottawas in Michigan worked seasonally as fruit and berry pickers, as lumberjacks, and in service jobs in resort hotels. Kumeyaays and Luiseños held most of the stevedore jobs on the docks of San Diego, California, and also worked on farms and ranches as fruit pickers, vaqueros, sheep herders, and shearers.
Ninety percent of African Americans lived in the South, where they slowly moved from sharecropping into jobs paying an individual wage. Their choices were severely limited: as of 1890, agriculture and domestic service employed the vast bulk of African American workers, 96 percent of the women and 85 percent of the men. Exceptions included stevedores and teamsters in New Orleans, iron foundry workers in Birmingham, brick makers in Richmond, coal miners in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, teachers in black schools, and clerical and sales employees of black-owned businesses.
The industrial Northeast saw a steep rise in the ranks of wage-earning women. Wives took jobs when their husbands’pay could not support a family, or stopped entirely; this was especially common in black communities. The numbers of working-class daughters earning wages rose even more sharply. Before the 1870s, only the poorest families had regularly put daughters out to work. During the Gilded Age, even relatively prosperous working-class households began to send their daughters into the labor market once they had finished grammar school (around age fourteen). Though they spent some of their pay on themselves, virtually all of these workers contributed most of their earnings to family coffers, sometimes to cover bare necessities and in other cases to finance luxuries like parlor furniture or good clothes. The new “working girls”—the vast majority white and nativeborn—usually took jobs in factories or as saleswomen in department stores but also included office clerks, school teachers, and custom dressmakers and milliners. Most remained wage workers until they married and became mothers, typically in their mid-twenties; those who did not marry often remained wage workers for life.
Income was unevenly distributed within the working class. Higher paying skilled jobs belonged almost exclusively to American-born white men or male immigrants from northwestern Europe. For their households, living standards rose despite the roller coaster economy. Thanks to falling prices, the cost of living declined even faster than employers cut wages in skilled trades.
Workers on every rung of the occupational hierarchy generally disdained those below. As Lucy Warner, a Connecticut cotton mill operative, wrote in 1891: “The teacher considers herself superior to the sewing girl, and the sewing girl thinks herself above the mill girl, and the mill girl thinks the girl who does general housework a little beneath her.” Stratification combined with the diversity of culture and language to divide the working class by color, ethnicity, gender, and occupation. Resentments and conflicts repeatedly led to violence across racial and ethnic lines.
The anti-Chinese movement accelerated. In October 1880, a white mob drove out the residents of Denver’s Chinatown, lynching one man along the way. In 1881, Texas railroad workers—Tejanos and Apaches as well as whites—repeatedly assaulted Chinese coworkers. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. The violence continued. In September 1885, after Chinese and Welsh coal miners brawled in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a mob attacked the Chinese section of the mining camp, killing twenty-eight and chasing the rest into the wilderness. White “ouster committees” drove Chinese from Tacoma, Washington, in November 1885 and from Seattle the following February.
African and Mexican Americans faced continued discrimination and violence. More than 2,500 African Americans were lynched between 1885 and 1900, mainly in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana. White craftsmen barred black men from most skilled trades. In August 1897, 1,400 white workers went on strike at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in Atlanta to protest the hiring of twenty black women. From the 1870s through the 1890s, Mexican Americans were lynched in Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado, and Anglo cowboys repeatedly raided Tejano towns such as Socorro and Tascosa.
Native-born white workers or immigrants from northwestern Europe often despised Slavs, Italians, and Russian Jews. Slavs were vilified as dumb and docile, though they were in fact quicker than most immigrants to organize and strike. In 1891, coal miners in Wheeling, West Virginia, walked off the job when their employer refused to fire Italians, and 500 boys employed in a New Jersey glass factory rioted when fourteen Russian Jews were hired. Even when people worked together in relative peace, social life was typically segregated by color and ethnicity.
Within working-class communities, different perspectives contended. For some people, personal advancement took precedence. Others were consumed by the daily struggle for survival. But a critical mass of activists proposed collective remedies for common problems. They aimed to rally workers to defend “the rights of labor” and build a better world for one and all. As the labor editor John Swinton put it, workers united had “the power to establish . . . an industrial community, under which neither the ‘bloated millionaire’ nor the abject starveling shall dishonor the country in which they dwell.”
Working people from every background and occupation had more in common than dependency on wages. Everyone was affected by the economic crises that defined the Gilded Age. Everyone saw how governors, legislators, and judges served the interests of the moneyed classes. Everyone beheld the arrogance of business spokesmen like John Hay, the corporate lawyer and Republican statesman who pontificated: “That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on your part or your father’s; that you have nothing is a judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not be if virtue and vice received the same reward.” Jay Gould’s New York World insulted all working people when it declared that, “Men must be contented to work for less wages. In this way the workingmen will be nearer to that station in life to which it has pleased God to call them.”
Working-class communities were also bound together by traditions of struggle and resistance. Leading labor activists often had a keen sense of the movement’s history in the United States, from the National Trades Union of the 1830s and ten-hour agitation of the 1840s to the National Labor Union and Colored National Labor Union of the Reconstruction era. These legacies blended with other militant traditions rooted in U.S. soil or imported from immigrants’ homelands.
Black communities harbored a rich heritage of resistance to slavery and included many veterans of the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction. One of the younger activists who carried on this legacy was Ida Wells. Born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, she attended a freedmen’s school and went to work as a teacher at age fourteen, supporting herself and four siblings after their parents died of yellow fever. At twenty-two she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she taught school until 1891, when she was fired for writing about conditions in the city’s segregated black schools. The following year, she published a report on the lynching of three black grocers and had to flee the South for her own safety. She continued to crusade against lynching, travelling and speaking widely in the United States and twice taking her campaign to Britain. Pausing only briefly after her marriage to Chicago civil rights activist Ferdinand Barnett, Ida Wells-Barnett organized black women in support of man
y causes, including women’s right to vote.
Working women sustained other activist traditions too. Like the mill workers who joined with genteel labor reformers to agitate for ten-hour laws in the 1840s, women trade unionists in Chicago came together with middle-class groups to form the Illinois Women’s Alliance in 1888. The Alliance campaigned for laws against sweatshops and child labor. Like the women who rallied behind the 1877 rail strike, Mary Septek organized an “Amazon army” of Hungarian, Polish, and Italian women to battle scabs during a miners’ strike near Hazelton, Pennsylvania, in September 1897.
Mexican American resistance to Anglo domination continued in the Southwest and increasingly targeted corporate power and privilege. In San Miguel County, New Mexico, Juan José Herrera and his brothers Pablo and Nicanor formed an underground organization known as Las Gorras Blancas (“The White Caps”) in 1887, recruiting up to 1,500 members within a couple of years. They conducted a guerrilla campaign against the Santa Fe Railroad and cattle corporations, cutting barbed wire fences and torching company property. Las Gorras also rallied behind an insurgent political party, El Partido del Pueblo Unido.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 16
